is a reporter focusing on film, TV, and pop culture. Before The Verge, he wrote about comic books, labor, race, and more at io9 and Gizmodo for almost five years.
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How it started
Even with all of the obvious concerns about copyright infringement and job displacement that generative AI presents, a steady chorus of voices has been insisting that this technology is going to be the future of filmmaking. A lot of gen AI supporters see it as a tool that’s “democratizing” art by lowering traditional barriers to entry like “learning how to draw,” “learning how to play an instrument,” or “learning how to write a story.”
And even though much of what we’ve seen out of the AI generated video space hasn’t been especially good, more and more entertainment studios seem to be betting on this technology to pay off (for them, especially) so long as everyone commits to it and ignores all of the potential harms that come along with it.
How it’s going
There are still a number of glaring limitations that make gen AI feel undercooked and ill suited for robust video production workflows. Most models can only create a few seconds of footage that tend to be inconsistent with their visual details, and they do not offer much in the way of fine-tune controls over their output. But that is not stopping Silicon Valley heavyweights and a number of AI startups from trying to deeply entrench themselves in the entertainment industry.
Over the past few months, major players in the gen AI space, including OpenAI, Google, and Meta, have been meeting with film studios in hopes of establishing close working relationships. Lionsgate, for example, signed a deal with Runway to produce an in-house generative AI model trained on the studio’s port of films. In late July, Amazon invested in Showrunner, a company that bills itself as the “Netflix of AI” and specializes in clunky, user-created animation generated with text prompts. And earlier this month, OpenAI announced its plans to produce a feature-length movie called Critterz that is meant to convince studios that they can and should produce projects entirely with gen AI.
There has also been a sharp uptick in partnerships / collaborations between established filmmakers — David Goyer, Darren Aronofsky, and James Cameron immediately come to mind — and outfits who are presenting AI-centric workflows as a solution to some of the industry’s larger ongoing issues with ballooning budgets that studios are struggling to make back against a generally depressed box office.
What happens next
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